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Google Businesses The Internet

China In the Habit of Copying and Redirecting US Sites? 468

Want to know why US web companies have trouble making it in China? gaz_hayes passed us a link to the blog commiepod, which suggests that successful US websites are targeted by 'Chinese government backed companies.' "These companies copy the site, deploy it on a .cn domain, and then DNS poison or forcefully lower the bandwidth the US site. Just a few weeks ago google.com and google.cn were DNS poisoned across the entire Chinese internet and were being redirected to their Chinese competitor Baidu. This probably explains Google's 3rd quarter market share in China." This is a fairly serious accusation; anyone else have first-hand experiences that would back this up?
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China In the Habit of Copying and Redirecting US Sites?

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  • Sheesh... (Score:2, Insightful)

    It's almost like the Chinese are a little leery of the US having a very large amount of control over the Internet. Not that I condone their actions (if this is true), but I can't say I'd be totally surprised.
    • Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shakrai ( 717556 ) * on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:07PM (#21400923) Journal

      It's almost like the Chinese are a little leery of the US having a very large amount of control over the Interne

      Oh, give me a break. This has nothing to do with being leery of the US and everything to do with wanting to undermine foreign businesses while promoting local ones. It's not like Google would be any less of a target if it was a British company....

      • Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Cassius Corodes ( 1084513 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:34PM (#21401121)
        What's the point of weathering a backlash by doing business in china and acquiescing to the government demands of censorship if after all that they just stab you in the back anyway?
        • Re:Sheesh... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 18, 2007 @07:01PM (#21401317)
          posting as anonymous coward for obvious reasons:

          Doing business with china regularly, it's just how they operate. to them its normal practice. if it's to their advantage they will do something, if it isn't they won't

          Like getting senior execs of a certain, now defunct, british car manufacturer drunk and signing away the company without reading the small print (note they expect foreign companies to follow the rules) *** allegedly ***
        • My guess would be that, backstab and all, Google makes more money this way than if they withdrew from China.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Obyron ( 615547 )
          They're the Middle Kingdom. They frankly believe it's their right to do whatever the hell they want to. Compare this to the attitude of Imperial Japan in WWII. Contrast it with countries like Taiwan and India.
    • by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @08:38PM (#21402021) Journal
      Honestly, the more I hear about China, the more it sounds like the (stereo)typical massive corruption scenario.

      I.e., no need to assume that there's some government hand behind it, or some meaningful form of protest against the west. It can be simply that some guy running their DNS servers/proxies/great-firewall/whatever got a nice bribe to redirect the lookups to someone selling the same kind of product, or an importer, or really whoever was willing to pay.

      The way the kleptocracy/corruption scenario goes is, basically, it doesn't matter how much you're paid, it only matters how much you can steal/embezzle/get-as-bribes. Whole hierarchies are formed where any job worth anything (in loot/bribes/whatever) is essentially either given to party leaders' relatives or auctioned to the highest bidder. And then it's considered pretty much normal and expected that you'd get your money back, and a nice profit, by stealing/embezzling/demanding-bribes/etc. Whatever works, really.

      My favourite example of what corruption _can_ do, and incidentally also is (A) about China, and (B) nicely illustrates that there is no need for it to even be motivated by some higher ideals or nationalism, is the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894 [wikipedia.org].

      Among various surrealism of it all, many shells used by the Chinese fleet were filled with sawdust or cement, because some enterprising souls in the navy had embezzled the funds for cordite and split the loot with the manufacturer. Or stuff as monumentally surrealistic as that a battleship was missing two main guns, which again had been stolen and sold on the black market. Yep, you've read that right: big f-ing guns off a battleship, simply dismantled and sold on the black market.

      You also find such surrealistic stuff, as that the fleet's second in command -- no doubt, some fellow with either high placed relatives, or who bought the job fair and square -- deliberately didn't relay the order to deploy into battle formation. The formation where the big ships could fire at the Japanese was also the formation where the Japanese could fire at the ship he's on, and, you know, he wasn't going to do stupid stuff like risk his own life for his country. At any rate, someone felt protected enough to ignore a direct order, even if it cost the country a humiliating defeat.

      That's the kind of thing that corruption can do. Someone didn't give a fuck about their country or about sticking it to the foreigners. They just cost their country a humiliating defeat, simply because, you know, there was something to steal or he had bribed someone powerful enough to ignore a direct order.

      So, regardless of whether you wish to see a continuity of that in China or not, well, that's how far corruption can go.

      And you don't even have to look one century back, the (ex)communist block provides a ton of more recent examples. And not even just the commies. Just about anywhere where some people were given enough unchecked power, some enterprising souls proceeded to sell their influence for cash. With similar results.

      The more devastating result being that they invariably destroyed a whole country's culture in the process. The little guys were allowed to steal or get a bribe worth maybe 1$, so they wouldn't mind when the party leaders stole a million bucks in one fell swoop.

      So now look at this particular incident, and you tell me if you really need some higher reason or motivation than bribe to explain it.

      It's freakin' sad, that's what it is.
      • by Conspire ( 102879 ) on Monday November 19, 2007 @12:13AM (#21403383) Homepage
        Note that some of the biggest corruption I have seen in China are orchestrated with the help of US and other foreign investors, corporations, etc.

        Take for example a large NASDAQ listed company, that was under internal investigation last year. I can't name names, but this is second hand knowledge from someone I know involved as a customer to this company and questioned in the investigation. Here goes:

        1. NASDAQ listed company founders and management write a huge option on their shares with a foreign bank. The shares are in lockup and due to be able to float in 6 months. The price that the bank pays, is based on a price they can sell (estimated) at the end of the lockup period in 6 months.

        2. Investigation begins, because of revenues being booked through companies the auditors (and competitors) have never heard of. It comes to light in the investigation, that the revenues are actually the proceeds from the share option sale (management and founders), to drive up stock price before the end of the lockup period.

        3. Underwriters, major investors (big names in US and Europe, can't say the names here) are all aware. Auditors are paid off. One board seat is changed. The truth is buried. The news never comes out because too many investors, banks would get burned.

        4. Stock still flying to this day. Fact is the company is a great model, but a big part of the accelerated growth prior to lockup expiring was fraud. Investors, bankers, underwriters knew it. Corruption on a mass scale involving US and European banks and investors.

        So, this is why I call China "the wild east". Things can go very backward fast and it is very hard to see the "real" picture in anything you do here.

        That being said, there are companies, like GE, that do very well in China while staying for the most part very "clean". It is not impossible to succeed in China without being corrupt. But the stories of corruption I have heard involving foreigners number at least on par with those involving locals only.............its a human disease not a "communist" or "socialist" or even "democratic" problem.....its human.
  • by terrencefw ( 605681 ) <[slashdot] [at] [jamesholden.net]> on Sunday November 18, 2007 @05:49PM (#21400765) Homepage
    This smells fishy, because if I remember correctly, Google owns a significant share of Baidu.
    • by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @05:53PM (#21400807)
      AFAIK, no outside (foreign) interests can own more than 49% of any Chinese enterprise - that way the Chinese retain the controlling interest of their companies.

      Google may have a part of Baidu, but MS had a piece of Apple in the late 90s or 2000s as well (part of a lawsuit agreement IIRC) yet nobody could realisitically accuse MS on whether or not they cared if their OS remain dominant or if they wouldn't mind ceding market to Apple.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by thx1138_az ( 163286 )

        AFAIK, no outside (foreign) interests can own more than 49% of any Chinese enterprise

        That's not technically true... You can own more than 50% of a Chinese company but you, as a foreigner, still can never have a controlling interest. It's funny how that works over there.
      • by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:20PM (#21401023) Homepage
        AFAIK, no outside (foreign) interests can own more than 49% of any Chinese enterprise - that way the Chinese retain the controlling interest of their companies.

        In all fairness, the US does the same both formally (no non-us controlling ownership of any US airline) and informally, as when the US congress stopped the buyout of port operator company. And before anybody starts squealing about "national security", neither has anything to do with it. The port operator is not in control of anything security related, and foreign airlines fly in US airspace all the time but just aren't allowed to go between two US destinations.

        • by TeraCo ( 410407 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @07:13PM (#21401427) Homepage
          Ports, Airlines, etc ARE strategic resource. Imagine if China presses for some trade advantage from the US and is rebuffed. If they had the ability to go close some of your major ports, you'd be feeling the pain really quickly.
          • by sholden ( 12227 )
            And television stations?

            There's a reason Murdoch is now an American...
          • by porpnorber ( 851345 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @10:41PM (#21402759)

            Welcome to globalisation, America. It's a good thing, remember? Petty national interests, including your petty national interests, need to become a thing of the past. And the view that shipping is a strategic resource and communication is not is bizarre beyond belief, moreso in a democracy such as you supposedly inhabit.

            Ports, Airlines, etc ARE strategic resource. Imagine if China presses for some trade advantage from the US and is rebuffed. If they had the ability to go close some of your major ports, you'd be feeling the pain really quickly.

            Then, and if it ever came to that, I think that's ultimately why you have an army. Defending your own ports is certainly a better use for it than, say, overthrowing foreign governments because you think you can embarrass the French by showing the world that they are as moronically unethical in their arms sales as you are, when actually they aren't....

            Yeah, yeah, it's a troll... but I am so tired of this doctrine that freedom of movement, freedom of trade, the rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech and the right to a good cup of coffee are to be the goals of the entire world, but only in so far as they inure solely to the benefit of the USA.

            As far as I can tell from non-US, non-Chinese news sources, the Chinese are presently trying at least as hard as the US to put their house in order. Their priorities may be different from yours, but yours are different from theirs, right? When CNN is a better news source than the Daily Show, maybe we can talk about Chinese information policy. When American corporations stop bullying foreign governments, we can talk about how foreign governments should be nicer to American corporations.

            ...And to those many readers who are American and not insane, look, I apologise for frothing at the mouth. I know it's worse for you than it is for me.

      • by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:52PM (#21401255) Journal
        The actual answer is "it depends"...

        For a manufacturing company, you as a foreigner can own - and control - 100% of a company. For a technical/service firm, you can own 60%. For a trading company, you can own 40%. So it really depends upon what the type of company is.

        China's also opened up so that foreigners can now outright own houses or apartments, something even Mexico doesn't allow...

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Conspire ( 102879 )
          These are flawed numbers. In China according to 2007 corporate law foreigners can own 100% of technical/services firms, trading companies, factories, and a whole lot more. Please see my other post in the parent discussion for details on how any limitations still lingering in the law can be worked around legally.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Google /had/ a 2.6% stake in Baidu, but it sold that off in mid-2006. So no, Google does not own any part of Baidu.
    • by Alascom ( 95042 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @07:11PM (#21401403)
      Google owned 5% of Bidu at the IPO. They sold their interest in Bidu almost 18 months ago.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @05:50PM (#21400783)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:02PM (#21400875) Journal
      Communism is utopian. It is built on 19th century pseudo-science, and it ought to be no more respectable to be a Communist than to be a Phrenologist.

      All economic and political models are NOT true science anyhow. All economic and political models benefit different people in different ways and no math will tell you the "right" way unless you first prove that person X deserves more than person Y (or that there "should" be an imbalance in the first place). Plus, much of economic models depends on consumer psychology, which is also a fuzzy science. At best models may tell you how to maximize something based on assumptions, but those assumptions and the weights on them are usually subjective.
           
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by edward2020 ( 985450 ) *

        All economic and political models benefit different people in different ways and no math will tell you the "right" way unless you first prove that person X deserves more than person Y

        Huh? Models are used to predict future actions and behavior, at least in so well as human behavior can be modeled. I think you meant "system," not "model." For example, neoliberal economic policies are a type of 'system.' Modernization or dependency theory, however, are models used to make predictions. Though I'll give you that sometimes they become confluent, but the system is what manfests in reality and the model is used to try to, well, model that system so as predictions can be made that might, just

      • by tftp ( 111690 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @07:09PM (#21401381) Homepage
        Socialism has at least one major fault: it depends on people taking their share of the common wealth, proportional to their contribution. Needless to say, this is impossible on every account. A genius scientist can be entitled to millions of dollars, but he is not married, lives at his lab and needs nothing. A family of janitors with 8 kids needs everything they can get from the society, and they are hardly earning anything from the society for their work.

        This is an imbalance that was counter to the proclaimed idea of equality, and it was very real in the USSR. In Stalin's time, for example, a professor could afford a personal chauffeured car, a maid or two, and the best living accommodation - this was when people were paid for their worth. After Stalin things changed: a scientist went hungry (130 R/mo) and an uneducated metal worker at a factory (400-500 R/mo) started buying cars, dachas and tourist trips. This was one of those things that doomed the USSR; I can't imagine a more stupid idea than to herd your best and brightest into the lowest class. Many of them escaped to Israel and the USA as soon as they could; it was simply insulting for them to remain, be paid a pittance, and see their skills wasted on picking up potatoes in the field with locals just sitting around, smoking and crudely joking about it.

        Communism goes even beyond that; but enough to say that Communism is based on the concept of unlimited availability of all worldly goods, and on unlimited consumption of those as your needs dictate. We can see Communism practiced on board of Enterprise in Star Trek, for example. Crew members can replicate anything they want and build whatever they like; use Holodecks as much as they want; and they are careful enough to take only what they really need, and not more. This is currently impossible because of many reasons, with unlimited availability of everything as one quite obvious example, and with a need for a "new human" as another concept that has no basis in reality.

        Communism (or socialism) works for ants, but humans are possessive animals, with urge to own everything and control everything. You can't build socialism with those humans. But at least the basic capitalism can channel those human urges to the greater good of the society; socialism and communism just pretend that those urges do not exist. Capitalism is simply socialism with a working method of enforcing the rules.

        • . We can see Communism practiced on board of Enterprise in Star Trek, for example. Crew members can replicate anything they want and build whatever they like; use Holodecks as much as they want

          It's funny, but, as much as StarFleet goes on about how they have eliminated scarcity, they never seem to have enough starships to go up against heavyweight enemies like the Borg or the Dominion. And, in TOS, Harry Mudd made "money", somehow. And, somehow, Federation personel would have to come up with that Latinum
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by mollymoo ( 202721 )

          Communism (or socialism) works for ants, but humans are possessive animals, with urge to own everything and control everything. You can't build socialism with those humans. But at least the basic capitalism can channel those human urges to the greater good of the society; socialism and communism just pretend that those urges do not exist. Capitalism is simply socialism with a working method of enforcing the rules.

          Pure, unmitigated bollocks. Capitalism does not channel selfish urges "for the greater good

    • China proves that Fascism, not Socialism, works

      Works for whom? and in what sense?

    • Yeah, it "works," but that doesn't mean it's especially great.

      This is in the same way that a state that simply jails dissidents "works," but I think government should be much less coercive.
    • You make an intelligent and well stated argument. The meaning of the word Fascism is misunderstood this days. The common unwashed masses have no idea of what Fascism is other than a word you throw around to discredit those you disagree with. I'm sorry to see this modded down as it really makes me question the actual average IQ of the /.er to which I assumed in the past to be well above the mean.
    • by leathered ( 780018 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:38PM (#21401139)
      Mod up please.

      'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.'
      'All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. '

      Two descriptions of Fascism by Benito Mussolini which apply to today's China perfectly. Though as you rightly point out meaning of the word Fascist has been lost on those who nowadays use it merely as an insult. Those same people are those who usually cannot accept that China is the archetypal Fascist state, in my view even more Fascist than Italy ever was in the 20s.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by shimage ( 954282 )

        Who are those alleged people you speak of? I use "fascist" as an insult, and I am totally with you on China being the archetypal Fascist state. You're even nice enough to explain why I think fascism is evil:

        All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

        That is as good and succinct a definition of Fascism as I have ever seen, and it makes me sick every time I read it. It's the antithesis of democracy, and I, for one, quite enjoy my freedom thank you very much.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          Fascism is the opposite of liberty, not democracy.

          Liberty and democracy are not the same thing. One is far more valuable than the other.
    • China proves that Fascism, not Socialism, works.

      But for how long? I think Fascism is unstable on the scale of decades as long as trade is free and easy.

      Modern economies depend on economic growth. If the elite capture all of that, you end up with terrible social stresses from the inequality, and you limit growth through lack of consumers and limited productivity. If you distribute the gains more widely, lots of people end up with luxuries like education, time to think, and the belief that the elite is no bet
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by wytcld ( 179112 )

        Once you have a comfortable middle class, I think it's hard to avoid ending up with democracy.

        Is that why the US is so assiduously removing the comfort from its middle class, if not eliminating that intermediate platform between "winners" and "losers" entirely?

        Back on topic: China's experience is not that of the West. The West looks back to the success of Athens, of the Roman Republic, and of the near-democracy of the northern European tribes (the Saxons, for instance; even the Iriquois Confederacy in Ameri

    • China proves that Fascism, not Socialism, works. China is a vindication of everything the post-Socialist Fascist movement thought was in need of change in Socialist ideology to make it work. As a result, China has many of the benefits of capitalism, but has the state control of the means of production that Socialism provides.

      No, it doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination. All China has proved that some organized method of industrialization proves an increase in the standard of living and wealth of a nation. Really, prior to the mid 1980s, China was so screwed up that just about means of exporting goods to the USA would improve them.

      Seriously... this sort of myth was really born of the "Hitler Miracle", about, how the Nazi regime supposedly turned the German economy around in the midst of the Great Depression. Sure, Nazi propaganda would have us believe the in the midth of Hitler's German economic juggernaut, but the truth is, if you look at the statistics - EVEN THE BRITISH WERE OUT PRODUCING THE GERMANS. I won't belabor the point of American production, because the Americans had population and other advantages over Germany. Instead, let's look at the British, whom had less population, less natural resources, and still managed to produce more aircraft and more warships than the Germans, ultimately cutting Germany off from the sea and then taking Germany out of the air.

      Essentially, all Germany could do was build a bunch of U-Boats that were just facelift improvements from World War I designs (the "modern" U-Boat came way too late to make a difference). Germany built two primary battleships - Bizmarck and Tirpitz. By contrast, the British built 5 battleships of the KGV class, more than a few aircraft carriers, and plenty of not only fighters, but also four engine heavy bombers. Germany could never build 4 engine bombers in number, becuase despite having an entire continent at her disposal, the Germans always had engine shortages...

      And, why was that?

      It's because fascism is a crooked and corrupt institution, and crooked institutions are not efficient. Tales of Nazi looting of other countries abound, but there was massive disorganization, massive crime... really, just imagine a bunch of thugs in a command economy, telling corporate bosses what to produce for war armaments... eventually, the whole thing would collapse... as indeed, it would have, under its own weight, had not the weight of a few million Allied soldiers and thousands of tons of Allied bombs not helped it along.

      And that's ultimately what's going to happen with China. Already, rumours abound about problems in the Chinese banking sector, there's inflation being swept under the rug, and there's all sorts of inefficiencies creeping in that are just swept under the rug.

      Bottom line is, fascist regimes always produce good economic results, only because we believe them when they tell us that we do. At some point, freedom really -does- matter, and that will catch up to China.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ravenshrike ( 808508 )
        *sighs* Germany's problem with production was that it kept trying to produce the best and strongest, which is no way to win a war you're in the middle of. Instead you just produce the stuff that's good enough for your needs. Because they kept attempting to keept their war machine on the bleeding edge in a war of survival, they kept having to do things like retool production lines and tech the workers how to build the new tech. Britain did no such thing, instead relying on technology like the flipping Sten g
        • *sighs* Germany's problem with production was that it kept trying to produce the best and strongest, which is no way to win a war you're in the middle of.

          But that's NOT TRUE at all. If it were true anywhere, it would be only true in the case of tanks, where the contractors were heavy machine makers and so treated each tank as a hand crafted thing. But even then, the Russian T-34 was a far better tank than the Panzers Germany entered the war with.

          Beyond that, Germany sacrificed a lot for expediency. The entire U-Boat war was a concession to not build the best. The famed type XXI U-Boat, which could have been a game changer, was kept on the drawing boards to build the earlier designs. Germany cancelled construction of potential aircraft carriers, never built additional battleships... her whole naval strategy was to fight a sort of a guerilla war.

          German infantry, for example, went to battle with a bolt action rifle, whereas her Yankee counterparts had the superior M1 Garand. And, you say, the "best"... German logistics trains relied in large part on steam locomotive engine and horse drawn transportation. Last time I checked, a truck was better than horse. The careful researcher will also note that the USA, incidentally, developed steam locomotives that significantly outperformed their German counterparts.

          And have a look at aircraft, again.... the BF-109 and Spitfire were fairly close aircraft going into the war and throughout the Battle of Britain, but, again, the Germans had no equivalent to the Lancaster Bomber.

          It goes on and on and on... Really, we have to look at the German Armed Forces for what they were. It had some modern tactics to help it early on, but, ultimately the whole thing was a mishmash of some misapplied high tech propaganda pieces to mask the overall inferiority of the whole thing. None of German's high tech weapons - the King Tiger, the V1 and V2, the ME-262, and the type XXI U-Boat, did a damned thing to change the outcome of the war, and her low tech weapons were simply not up to scratch.

          Germany had an army that entered the war with tanks that weren't even as good as their French counterparts, a fighter aircraft that only matched the best the British could produce, had no real logistics support, a navy that lacked the capital ships to challenge its obvious rival, radar and signals intelligence nowhere near as advanced as her British counterparts. German communications was so bad that not only were all of their tactical communications read by the allies, the Germans didn't even realize that they were being read, despite obvious failures.
    • by br00tus ( 528477 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @07:11PM (#21401411)
      I agree China is not socialist. The vast majority of communists that still exist in the world do not consider it so. They date it somewhere between Mao making nice with Nixon and Deng Xiaoping coming to power. Remember that Deng Xiaoping was considered to be one of the biggest villains during the Cultural Revolution.

      Karl Marx founded communism on materialist principles, not utopian ones. It doesn't mean all of his theories are correct, but they are not utopian. In fact he founded his school of thought in response to utopian socialist/communist ideologies of the time. I don't know how rational our system is with the president talking about God all the time and appealing to his base with his supposdely shared belief that some Jew 2000 years ago had magic powers.

      Marxism is scientific insofar as it is consciously built on materialist, scientific notions. It is not scientific insofar as when it is incorrect. I would say even most educated Americans I know have no arguments against Marxian thought since they know nothing of it. They say "People will not act a certain way because human nature is..." or something like that which is never a scientific, rational argument. There are strong arguments against Marxian thought, but they are more along the lines of "Marx's economic system does not translate values to prices correctly". But most Americans, even educated ones, know too little about Marxism to make arguments against them.

      Also, while Marx's socialism involves a proletariat-directed taking over of the economy by the state, there are other forms of socialism, like the anarcho-syndicalists who think economic decisions should be made by workers at their place of employment. Or people who advocate workers councils and so on. Many on the left question whether the USSR was what Marx intended, and Lenin himself talked about pulling away from socialism during the New Economic Policy. Only to Americans does socialism mean big government versus small government, in Europe it means who will control the "means of production".

  • fsck china (Score:4, Funny)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @05:51PM (#21400789)
    i think the USA should pull the plug on them, (physically remove their intertubes from connecting to the US intertubes)...
    • They tried doing that in Iraq at the beginning of the invasion.

      Unfortunately their own redundant technology backfired on them and they learnt the hard way that its impossible to disconnect the internet from a country. :)
      Traffic re-routes its self pretty damn quickly.
  • by foobsr ( 693224 ) * on Sunday November 18, 2007 @05:53PM (#21400801) Homepage Journal
    "Replacement of Google with Alternative Search Systems in China — Documentation and Screen Shots"
    http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/google-replacements/ [harvard.edu]
    Last Updated: September 24, 2002

    On this basis: "Google censors itself for China" — http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4645596.stm [bbc.co.uk] — Wednesday, 25 January 2006

    Define ethics and business ethics within the context of a multi-billion dollar market. Do not be shy!

    CC.
    • by fmobus ( 831767 )
      Just playing devil's advocate here, but... are screenshots valid proof? Not only the could have been doctored, but in this case it would not even require Photoshop-like tools. Just go to "offending" site, focus on the location bar, type the address and unfocus (do not press enter). Voilá, instant screenshot of DNS trickery.
      • by Shakrai ( 717556 ) *

        Voilá, instant screenshot of DNS trickery.

        Wonder if you could use tor to prove/disprove this? I've seen tor exit nodes in China, but if they are doing this via DNS poisoning and not ip-redirection I'm not sure if that would help you. How does tor handle DNS requests? Do they exit at the same node as your connection or at random ones?

  • quite. (Score:5, Informative)

    by apodyopsis ( 1048476 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @05:55PM (#21400821)
    No surprise.

    I used to work in China quite alot and found the only way I could get decent Internet access and get things done was to VPN back to the UK office and then surf from their gateway - the slight delay was quite alot better then the local service.

    I got used to shitty performance, websites suddenly dying for no reason, 30 second delays on some sites and others almost instant.

    As with most things Chinese, we may see this at dodgy behavior - to them it is a normal business practice. As I once stated on a thread about Chinese knockoffs the problem is not to "stop them doing it" but is rather "to make them understand they are doing something wrong in the first place".
    • As I once stated on a thread about Chinese knockoffs the problem is not to "stop them doing it" but is rather "to make them understand they are doing something wrong in the first place".
      Not everyone has your sense of ethics. They may not stop doing something wrong if they find it useful.
      Isn't the widespread lack of ethics one of the main reasons why we have laws?
      • by o'reor ( 581921 )

        Isn't the widespread lack of ethics one of the main reasons why we have laws?

        Yes, but passing international laws or agreeing on international ethical practices is quite another matter. One civilization's set of ethics may be quite different from another's, hence different laws. In the Chinese view, according to their set of ethics, they are not doing anything wrong.

        And this is why the current trend towards more IP laws in the Western World is so wrongheaded in the first place, as if the 5 billion people

    • Re:quite. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:17PM (#21401005)
      I got used to shitty performance, websites suddenly dying for no reason, 30 second delays on some sites and others almost instant.

      They use Comcast in China, too?!

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )
      It's interesting. Based on your analysis of the Chinese character, it sounds like your average Chinese is willing to step over the bodies of his comrades, so to speak, it will allow him to get ahead. "Competition" that damages the competitors is seen as being just as legitimate as competition that advances one's own position. I wonder -- is this extreme, cutthroat attitude toward personal advancement the result of a society that enforces equality for everyone? Not that this "equality" is really true, mind y
  • South Africa (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:10PM (#21400945)
    I know some people in South Africa had this problem when going to yahoo.com they were redirected to Baidu. http://mybroadband.co.za/news/General/1678.html [mybroadband.co.za]
  • by wikinerd ( 809585 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:13PM (#21400981) Journal

    They actually do worse things, like torturing Tibetan nuns, and you worry whether you can access your favourite search engine in China?

    • by Gigiya ( 1022729 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:23PM (#21401045)
      Yes.
    • by theodicey ( 662941 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:52PM (#21401261)
      Without access to the uncensored real Internet, how exactly do you think Chinese people will find out about the atrocities committed by their government in their name?
  • My stuff got copied (Score:5, Informative)

    by harmonica ( 29841 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:19PM (#21401011)
    Someone has copied a number of pages from my site. A link to my original URL was included, though. When I finally found a mail address, the person replying was apologetic and claimed to only have done it because my pages were so slow to access from China. He/She removed the page, but there were copies later of other pages. I gave up asking for removal -- it cost me a lot of time just finding the mail address in that case. Everything is in Chinese. It's a bit annoying, but there's not much I think I can do and I don't think anyone's trying to steal from me.
    • by wdr1 ( 31310 ) *
      Um, welcome to the Internet?

      By no means is this is a China-only issue. It happens all the time in Western countries. If you're complaint is they're harder to deal with because they speak Chinese, that's mildly ridiculous.

      -Bill
    • by pikine ( 771084 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @07:24PM (#21401501) Journal

      In the Chinese net culture, full-text being copied and pasted is a compliment, showing popularity of the work. You always find the work of popular online novelists "mirrored" on multiple websites. People usually acknowledge the author but does not always provide a URL reference. Plagiarism, or more specifically, defrauding the reader of authorship of the work, usually isn't the motivation.

      This copy and paste culture can be traced to two historical reasons: (1) before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying. This is what student used to do in school. By the time you finished school, you would have copied a number of literature works by hand. And (2), private, unregulated hand-copying is the only way literature can survive over several oppressive emperors.

      The former practice can still be seen prevalent in many CJK education system nowadays, where students are asked to manually copy some text on a regular basis as a part of the learning process. The latter reason still applies today as well; you'd see full-text of an article posted on an online BBS forum only to be taken down later by the authority, and someone posts the full-text again on another BBS forum.

      In addition, copyright and authorship are separate issues. Interestingly, the British first invented copyright in order to allow the royalty to regulate printing of books (i.e. for censorship). Copyright granted the print shop a license to print a work. Without a license it would be illegal. Copyright was not invented to protect authorship.

      In conclusion, it is not that the Chinese does not respect authorship. Copyright is simply unsuitable under the historical and cultural context. This seems to chime with the notion that real man upload his code on FTP and let everyone else mirror it, as said by some Linus dude.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        ...before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying.

        Um, the Chinese have disseminated printed literature for more than a thousand years now. The copying by hand stems from the central position calligraphy has in their culture. The only way to attain a hand that will not expose you as an uncultured clod is by copying whole books hand-written by masters of the art. It is a learning method, not a way to keep literature in circulation, since those Confucian classics etc. would be massively available in woodblock print versions as well.

  • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:24PM (#21401067) Journal
    http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/10/9/230755.shtml?s=icp [newsmax.com]

    Excerpt:

    America's middle-class was shrinking as the country lost its manufacturing base and jobs to inexpensive imports, Trump said in an interview at his Manhattan office, pointing especially to China.

    "If you want to open a business in China, it is virtually impossible," Trump said. "And yet, if China wants to come here and do something, there is no problem whatsoever."...

    "China is doing a major number on the United States," Trump said. "If we had politicians that knew what they were doing, they would stop that so fast that your head would spin."

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      They pretty much have the rest of the world by the balls and they know it. It's amazing some of the stuff they get away with because they know exactly how to manipulate the rest of the world. The biggest thing they manage to do is to act both like a superpower and a developing nation that needs protection. They don't want to open up a lot of sectors of their economy to foreign competition, so they claim they are a developing economy and get various WTO/UN/other world body protections, however when it su
      • by ChronosWS ( 706209 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @08:48PM (#21402093)
        They don't have anybody by the balls. If they had us by the balls, they could stop producing/selling goods to us. They can't do that. Ergo, they don't have any more control than we let them have by mutual agreement. That's how it works with globalization. They play by the same rules, its just that for now we see value in the lower cost of goods from them.

        Yes, China can become a superpower perhaps. If they are smart, they won't bother with a huge military buildup a-la the Cold War because that's a true waste of money, and there is nothing to gain from it. Like the US, they don't really want to rock the boat *too* much, because uncertainty is just as bad for them as it is for us - after all you can't really do a good job of controlling your economy if you can't reasonably predict what is going to happen in the next few years.

        The only 'danger' there is is that China will truly have to be dealt with as an equal and respected as a technological force - eventually. That's not a bad thing, it can only help all of us to have another set of bright people building stuff.
      • by MrSteveSD ( 801820 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @08:49PM (#21402095)

        To be fair, both the US and EU are guilty of this to some degree, but nowhere near what China does.


        You have to be joking. Aside from Tibet, how many countries has China invaded in the last 50 years? The US has thrown it's weight around enormously more than China, right from installing Dictators (e.g. Shah of Iran) to direct invasions and much of this has been about securing access to resources and markets. The US even engineered the overthrow of the Guatemalan government just so that United Fruits could avoid paying taxes. China's brutality is mostly internal, in contrast to the US which is free internally but brutal externally.

        The EU is not throwing it's weight around on a US level, but there are a few nasty examples. Britain was of course involved in the installation of the Shah of Iran (to secure access to the oil) but France has been waging a secret war in the mineral-rich Central African Republic for decades. Right now they have "peace keeping" troops there, but they used to control it directly and basically used the population as slave labour.

        I'm sure that if/when China starts overthrowing governments all over the Middle East and in South America, we kill kick up a huge fuss and be on the brink of World War 3, but western countries have been doing this sort of thing for the last 50 years or more. We don't complain about it too much because we are rarely on the receiving end of all the violence but if we were, we would probably be just as angry as people like Chavez and Ortega.
    • by Trogre ( 513942 )
      One way you can help:

      Next time you're out shopping, look for labels that say "MADE IN CHINA". That way you'll know what not to buy.

      Seriously, these guys are killing our economy. Local manufacturers can't compete with the cheap crap coming from China these days, so much so that a lot of them are actually packing up and moving their operations over there. Unfortunately self-centric consumers will always go for the lower-priced item if of comparable quality.

  • by shbazjinkens ( 776313 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:37PM (#21401131)
    How come there's no mention of this on slashdot.cn?
  • I'm sure all those with firsthand experience are busy complaining about it right now, on slashdot.cn.
    • If you go top slashdot.cn you end up at digibuzz.com which seems to be a site similar to slashdot in content.

      I wonder if this would qualify as a bad faith domain name registration under WIPO rules.

  • by monopole ( 44023 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @06:47PM (#21401219)
    I didn't know DNS was susceptible to lead. Maybe they're using GHB.
  • True! True! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Freelife ( 1190827 )
    This is unquestionable true. We see it everywhere in China. Tor saved our life!
  • Let's face it, why-ever would China sit on its hands and watch a US company like Google develop into the biggest search engine for their slice of the Internet?

    Think about what it would mean if they let Google expand as it wants. All those advertising revenues ... gone. Control over which websites appear in searches (and at what level) and which don't ... gone. A great way for their security forces to keep tabs on what searches are made ... gone. A natural niche for their home-grown search engine company .

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 18, 2007 @08:02PM (#21401751)
    1. Wikipedia is redirected to Baidu knows [baidu.com], which is a copycat (I would call it plagiarism) of wikipedia minus all "unwanted" information of the Chinese government.
    2. youtube is redirected to 6 rooms [6.cn], another idea copycat.
  • vnet.cn (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pangloss ( 25315 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @09:00PM (#21402161) Journal
    Last year and through part of this year, there were reports of some sort of DNS poisoning in China involving vnet.cn. See: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=60083 [macosxhints.com] for one report of the behavior. In the link I posted, the user was worried the problem was due to some sort of malware, but I witnessed the same behavior firsthand (domain names apparently at random resolving to a vnet.cn address) where the problem was not due to malware local to a particular user's machine. In the cases I witnessed, the DNS servers were operated by China Telecom.
  • Some real info (Score:5, Informative)

    by Conspire ( 102879 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @09:54PM (#21402501) Homepage
    OK, I see a lot of posts here with some misleading info. Just to clear the air:

    1. Foreign companies can own 100% of China enterprises (in some industries), and this is called a WOFE (Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise)

    2. For any company to operate a web site in China, they need an ICP (Internet Content Provider) license.

    3. Only domestic PRC entities (citizens), can get an ICP license (any foreign ownership and ICP license cannot be issued)

    4. There are ways around #2+#3, through a legal loophole which is quite simply, a) the foreign company has their in country manager or other domestic person setup a 100% domestic owned PRC company to get the ICP license. b) the foreign company has a proxy agreement and share pledge with the "official" shareholder(s) of that PRC domestic company which are side contracts giving control and management of the domestic company to the foreign owned (WOFE) of the foreign investors. c) The WOFE also has a contract with the PRC company to extract all revenue out through a "technical services and management agreements". d) The WOFE then is able to book all the revenue from the company, making it a synthetic subsidiary and thus getting around all the laws forbidding foreign investment in the PRC company. (interesting note, this structure was designed in the 70's to get around foreign investment limitations in petrochemical industries, and is now used by all the major internet and game companies listed abroad, ie: tom.com, sina.com, snda.com, Google, Yahoo etc.)

    5. The telcos here (China Netcom and China Telecom) often seem to re-direct traffic as the post claims. I have seen google.com traffic redirected for an entire weekend to 114.cn, which is China Telecom's lame search engine! Baidu.com redirect I see much less often. There are also many others for instance ALL traffic was redirecting to Yahoo.cn on my cable broadband connection from my house yesterday, no idea why Yahoo.cn, but it was.

    6. A lot of traffic to the China internet portal kings is fake, by fake think how gold farming in MMOGs works, people playing for gold and getting paid 0.50 cents an hour to play in China. I have heard *rumors* from insider friends saying that many portals pay people the equivalent to click on links all day.....think market cap and ad revenue reporting.....it would not surprise me in the least but I can't say I have seen it personally.

  • First Hand (Score:4, Funny)

    by A Guy From Ottawa ( 599281 ) on Sunday November 18, 2007 @10:35PM (#21402713)
    When I was in China last April and went to slashdot I got redirected to some site all pink and pretty. If I remember correctly it was about ponies. I thought at the time it was strange but now I know it was the gvt.

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